I am co-director of the International Centre for Evidence in Disability at LSHTM, with Professor Hannah Kuper.  My qualitative social research has been with disabled people, in UK and Africa, exploring social and economic consequences of impairment and illness.   Specific projects have been about: disabled people's sexual and reproductive rights; disabled childhoods; resilience and success for disabled people in Africa; independent living and social care; rights-based rehabilitation; mental health recovery.  I also have an interest in bioethics as it pertains to disabled people, specifically prenatal testing and end of life and assisted dying.  

With Professor Hannah Kuper, I am currently co-director of the PENDA programme of impact analyses of interventions to improve the lives of disabled people in LMICs.  With Dr Morgan Banks, we have begun research about the impact of Covid-19 on disabled people in Ghana, Zambia, India, Bangladesh and with Syrian refugees in Turkey.  Both these programmes are funded by FCDO.

With colleagues in the Global Mental Health Programme, I am PI of SUCCEED, a project to co-produce and evaluate multi-disciplinary approaches to psychosis in four AFrican countries, also funded by FCDO; I also contribute a disability lens to ACCESS, a collaboration led by IPPF to address SRHR in the development-humanitarian nexus, collaborating with Professor Cicely Marston and team; I supervise a team evaluating the LCD-led i2i disability employment programme in Kenya and Bangladesh.  All these research programmes are funded by FCDO. 

Most recently I have started the Disability Evidence Portal (www.disabilityevidence.org), which aims to provide 100 evidence briefs on disability for policy-makers.  In 2020-1, I have been PI of a UKRI-funded programme gathering qualitative evidence about impact of Covid-19 on disabled people in England and Scotland.